Abd al-Karim Qasim

Abd al-Karim Qasim (21 November 1914-9 February 1963) was Prime Minister of Iraq from 14 July 1958 to 9 February 1963, succeeding Ahmad Mukhtar Baban and preceding Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr.

Biography
Abd al-Karim Qasim was born on 21 November 1914 in Baghdad, Ottoman Empire to a Sunni Muslim Arab family. He served in the Iraqi Army and was trained in the United Kingdom, and in 1935 he put down tribal unrest in the Middle Euphrates, followed by fighting in the May 1941 Anglo-Iraqi War, the 1945 war in Kurdistan, and the First Arab-Israeli War in 1948-49. As a veteran military man, he became the leader of some opposition groups within the army and took part in the July 14 Revolution against King Faisal II of Iraq, who was executed with the Hashemites after the uprising. Qasim became the new Prime Minister under the Sovereignty Council, and the government became an autocracy with Qasim as its leader. He lifted a ban on the Iraqi Communist Party and sought to annex Kuwait as the 20th governorate of the Republic of Iraq, having a rivalry with Kuwait's protector, the United Kingdom. He nationalized 99% of the British-owned Iraqi Petroleum Company's land and built 35,000 residential units in Baghdad, but he faced policy failures by attacking Massoud Barzani's Peshmerga units and starting the First Iraqi-Kurdish War in 1961, and on 1 July 1961 British Army troops came to Kuwait to stop Qasim from annexing the country. Iraq was isolated from the Arab World due to the Kuwait crisis, and he became an unpopular dictator. On 8 February 1963, the Iraqi Ba'ath Party overthrew him in a coup, and a day later he was executed by firing squad. Up to 5,000 Iraqi communists were killed when the new government put down the communist party.